The last time I saw George Weidenfeld was two years ago at his club in central London. Anyone who knew “Lord” Weidenfeld was aware that any conversation with him would invariably flow rapidly through politics, art, music, theater, literature, history, travel, you name it. It could be dizzying. It was always charming and illuminating.

In that final conversation, I remember his energetic praise for the conducting of Christian Thielemann, director of the Salzburg Easter Festival. Of course, Weidenfeld had enjoyed dinner with the Berlin-born conductor the week before, following a performance of Beethoven in Austria.

Weidenfeld hobnobbed with everyone. I can’t recall whether it was over a glass of wine that evening, or over a previous lunch, that he told me he’d be having breakfast the next morning with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. He seemed like a kid in a candy store.

The hobnobbing had been a passion and a pastime of his for decades. My young economist friend Dalibor Rohac tells me that when he first met Weidenfeld at a conference a few years ago and introduced himself as being from Czechoslovakia, Weidenfeld told him he had once known Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak president who famously opposed Nazi claims to the Sudetenland in 1938.

The major events of the last 100 years defined Weidenfeld’s life.

Who hadn’t been part of the Weidenfeld circle over the decades? After establishing in 1945 what would become the legendary publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Weidenfeld helped bring into the world three years later Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” That same year, when the state of Israel was founded, Weidenfeld became an advisor to the Jewish state’s first president, Chaim Weizmann.

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One might have the feeling that Weidenfeld, who died on Wednesday,began to sense the frantic pulse of history in the womb. He was born in Vienna on September 13, 1919, a year when Freud was feuding with Jung in the Austrian capital and the English physicist and astronomer Arthur Eddington was performing, thanks to a total eclipse of the sun, the first experimental test on Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was also the year that a small group of nationalists established the German Workers’ Party and started selling a tobacco known as “anti-Semite” to raise funds for what would become Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

The major events of the last 100 years defined Weidenfeld’s life. In 1939 he fled the Nazis, arrived in London with not much more than the shirt on his back, and joined the BBC. As a radio commentator and newspaper columnist he came into contact with the likes of Tito and Charles de Gaulle. As a publisher after World War II, in addition to “Lolita,” he helped give birth to Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” “The Group” (1963) by Mary McCarthy, and “The Double Helix” (1968) by the Nobel prize winning geneticist James Watson.

He never stopped advancing the argument that America must remain close to Europe.

I got to know Weidenfeld in the 1990s. We stayed in touch during my dozen years in Europe, starting in 2001, while I was running think tanks in London and Berlin and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. I think he found me a curiosity; an American who spoke German who had once studied music in Salzburg and a U.S. foreign policy hawk who remained engaged and committed to Europe in a period when the United States was being jerked by events to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Weidenfeld himself was a man with a strong center of gravity. As someone else who knew him put it on Wednesday, Weidenfeld was “the last British European — though he wasn’t British, he was certainly European.”

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In recent years, Weidenfeld had become deeply involved in educational work aimed at countering violent extremism. He told an interviewer for the German daily Die Welt in December that his friend Merkel, while well intentioned, was guilty of sloppy thinking if she believed that large numbers of refugees from Syria and other Muslim-majority countries would be easily absorbed by Germany and other European states. He never stopped advancing the argument that America must remain close to Europe. He deemed it essential that European integration stay on track, and that both Europe and America remain firmly committed to the defense of Israel. Other than that, he was refreshingly resistant to ideology, and always strongly opinionated.

There will be a great deal to miss in the passing of Weidenfeld, including his civility and charm, his erudition and deep personal connection to some of the great figures and events of modern history.

I confess there was a time some years ago when I found Weidenfeld’s thinking about Europe antiquated. I was more of the Thatcher school and saw an association of free trading, Atlantic-minded, liberal, democratic nation-states as the most obvious basis for a prosperous and secure European future. It seemed absurd to me when Helmut Kohl and other EU leaders would posture that introducing the euro had something to do with the future of peace in Europe. Of course, a single currency per se has nothing to do with it. But with signs now that Europe may be coming unglued — the Greek bailout, the piecemeal suspension of Schengen, the attacks in Paris and the antics of populist governments in Warsaw and Budapest, not to mention the prospect of a British exit from the EU — I’ve come to the view that Euroskeptics ought to be forewarned. A soft landing for any of this is hardly pre-ordained.

Weidenfeld’s thinking wasn’t antiquated at all. He seemed to grasp, as Mark Twain put it, that while history seldom repeats itself, it more than occasionally rhymes. In Weidenfeld’s birth year of 1919 the USSR intervened in Ukraine, Mussolini started his fascist party in Italy, and America placed its faith in the League of Nations as a guarantor of world peace.

In the 1933 novel “The Shape of Things to Come,” H.G. Wells was predicting the outbreak of World War II, war between Germany and Poland, and fighting between the United States and Japan. His science fiction book also envisaged a benevolent dictatorship of elites, burgeoning globalization, English as the global lingua franca, and the eradication of religions. At least some of these things seem to be the very matters that provoke anxiety and anger in America and Europe today.

There will be a great deal to miss in the passing of Weidenfeld, including his civility and charm, his erudition and deep personal connection to some of the great figures and events of modern history. In a time when most of the modern world finds itself buried in information and technical expertise, however, I think what we’ll miss most about Weidenfeld are his experience, his wisdom and his lively and energetic imagination.

Jeffrey Gedmin is senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and Georgetown University, and senior adviser at Blue Star Strategies.